As you may have guessed from my previous post, things did not end well between my HP printer and I. It balked at printing a measly 150 pages, and insisted that I pay $30 for two ink cartridges to do so. Two. Ink. Cartridges. Brand new. And it managed to print half.

So, suffice it to say, we’ve got a new printer that happily printed out my entire manuscript, front and back, without having to manually flip each piece of paper (bonus!) so I’m a happy camper. And the toner cartridge prints – get this – over 2,000 pages (and it’s only $15 more). I know, my printer obsession is a little weird, but at this stage of the book, I need to be able to print it out and edit it with a pen. It’s a LOT easier to read on paper, and much easier to revise. Much as I love Scrivener, I need to be able to print the pages out. Consequently, my old HP printer is sitting in a corner thinking about what it’s done. Running to Kinko’s every time I needed to print out the draft wasn’t an option, as it was only marginally cheaper (and far less convenient) than using the HP printer. keep reading »

I actually remember when Hewlett-Packard had some decent products. My dad used to have an old inkjet printer that would churn out pages – I think it printed somewhere around 250 pages per cartridge. It was black and white, and by the time it was on its last legs, I had to hand feed it paper, but it was a true workhorse.
These days, HP seems to hold its customers in the same regard one might hold a cockroach they’ve just discovered crawling through their silverware drawer. That is to say, with surprise, horror and disdain. Here’s why: keep reading »

As we approach the new year, my schedule becomes a lot tighter. While I still don’t have a set deadline for each week, I try to get through a chapter a week if I can. If the best I can accomplish is jotting down a note about a plot point that would be really good to add somewhere in this book, I consider that a win. I’ve scheduled a week of vacation time to finish it up in the first week of January. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. If I’m ahead of schedule, it means a full week of submerging my face with a scuba mask on into a bowl of cold spaghetti while guzzling ice cold diet doctor pepper and playing long rounds of The Sims 3, because when I game, I game girly. I don’t really know why or how cold spaghetti figures into my fantasy of what it must be like to “relax” and be on “vacation,” but trust me, at least I no longer stare blankly like a confused puppy when people tell me I need to learn how to relax and not work all the time.